Wild Island (19 page)

‘No, indeed. Each must find his appointed way.'

With the departure of Jane and Rochester, the talk also turned again to speculation about Rowland Rochester.

‘But if he is alive and heir to an estate in England,' McLeod asked, ‘why did he go to Van Diemen's Land?'

‘Perhaps he had some friend there?' asked Mrs Chesney.

‘He knew Lieutenant Booth and others in the twenty-first,' I said. ‘But that Regiment was not sent to Van Diemen's Land until eight years after Rowland left the West Indies.'

‘Booth is a Captain now. Has been for some years,' said McLeod.

‘You are acquainted with him?'

‘I have met him through my friend Dr James Ross. Ross's wife, Susan, has a sister, Charlotte, who is married to Thomas Lempriere, Booth's Commissariat Officer at Port Arthur. Ross is not a medico but a scholar, a former editor of the
Hobart Town Gazette
.'

Natty climbed onto Mrs Chesney's lap and began to grizzle and pull at her sewing.

‘Chesney?' she said, trying to sew at arm's length. ‘Parson Knopwood might know something of Mr Rowland Rochester?'

I scooped Natty off her lap. He squirmed and squealed.

‘Aye, it's possible,' said Chesney.

‘By Parson Knopwood I mean Mr Robert Knopwood,' Mrs Chesney explained, ‘chaplain in the colony since Hobarton was settled. He knows everyone's connections and keeps his memory wonderfully. He must be seventy now. I don't mean he gives such things out gossiping. Only what can properly be told.'

‘Aye, and you'd be surprised what
can't
be told,' added Chesney with a grunt of laughter. ‘A good many families in the island have secrets. ‘

‘Van Diemen's Land is full of stories,' said his wife. ‘On account of we've most of us come there full-grown, with our stories ready-made.'

‘But you'd best not believe everything you hear!' Chesney grinned. ‘I've heard tales that fanciful you'd swear they come out o' books, but I know for a fact they're true as I sit here. Others sound that real you'd stake your life on 'em, and they're nowt but a pack of lies!'

‘Mr Jorgen Jorgensen,' said Mrs Chesney, nodding. ‘A convict, and now a constable . . . but is he King of Iceland? Him and his fat wife, poor Norah. Now there's a madwoman for you. Trying to take her own life, and him at his wit's end trying to prevent it. Half the things he says are true as bread and butter, but as for the rest . . .'

‘Gus Bergman might know of Rochester,' said Chesney. ‘He goes tramping all about the island with his surveys.'

‘Mr Bergman is a Jewish,' Mrs Chesney said to me, ‘but a lovely man.'

Such meandering conversations drifted on with the slowly passing days.

Anna thrived in the hot weather, although she slept long hours. She spoke little, often sitting silent for half an hour gazing unseeingly into the distance. I made many sketches of her like this. Quigley asked me privately if I could spare one, and bore it away in triumph. Anna did not care for reading but would pore over the illustrations in Mrs Chesney's old copies of
The Ladies Cabinet of Fashions
. Through these she became reconciled to current modes and began to make herself one of the wide linen collars then in fashion. Her stitching
was clumsy at first, but she soon began to recover what had clearly been a great skill.

When Mrs Chesney exclaimed over the fine work, Anna said slowly, ‘Two gifts the nuns gave me: sewing and music. Also we learned deportment, cleanliness, good manners and kindness to God's poor. And what to say to yourself when you think a sin. You say,
Save me Lord, I perish
.'

I was puzzled. ‘A convent school? Are you of the Roman Church, Anna?'

Her mother was, she said. Her stepfather, Mr Mason, had no religion. When he sent her to the convent he'd shrugged and said, ‘She's the daughter of a mad Creole whore. She'll go to the devil one way as quick as another.'

Mrs Chesney looked at me, looked away.

Neptune, or Badger Bag, as sailors call him, came aboard as we crossed the Line, and two of the crew who had not ‘crossed' before were baptised with buckets of rancid slops and ritual humiliations.

‘It has to be done,' Quigley said. ‘We sailors are a superstitious lot. It's no light matter to cross from the top of the world to the bottom.'

Even before this, evenings of gaiety had begun. Lanterns were hung at dusk and there was a seraphine for music. It was a new instrument, like a small pianoforte. Its tone was too bright and jangling for me, but it served to accompany the dancing. Wallace danced well, but he would often retire to his cabin rather than join in. The doctor and McLeod danced with Louisa, although McLeod did not know the steps and had to be pushed and pulled through a set of ‘Strip the Willow' with laughter and breathless cries of instruction.

‘Oh, Mr McLeod,' gasped Mrs Chesney, weeping with mirth. ‘You'll be the death of me. I always did love to dance.'

‘Hah!' he cried, ‘I have the way of it now. Come, give me your arm, madam, we'll go about once more.'

‘Oh, no, no,' she moaned, mopping her red face. ‘Here is Harriet
playing for us all this time. Louisa will take the instrument a while, won't you, my dear? Do you go round with Harriet, Mr McLeod.'

When she had recovered, Mrs Chesney said it was as good as a ‘rout', a ‘levvy' or a ‘swarry', all of which were plentiful in Hobarton, she reassured us.

On another night the Captain brought a guitar into the saloon, saying to Anna, ‘This is the instrument I spoke of.' She plucked the strings slowly, twisted the pegs, and after a time played songs so melancholy they made you want to weep. Later, the rhythms became more troubling, lopsided beats like an overtaxed heart.

Another long, hot afternoon. After a silence, James Seymour said idly: ‘I have been told—that Mr Algy Montagu, the Mad Judge in Hobarton, was brought up by the poet Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. Can it be true?'

I listened more closely now when there was talk of Van Diemen's Land, which began to seem to me peopled only with convicts, eccentrics and misfits.

‘Why yes,' said Bess Chesney, ‘Judge Montagu's history is a tragical one; his grandmama was murdered on the steps of the Opera House in Covent Garding by a clergyman mad for love.'

Seymour laughed and looked at McLeod, who nodded and said, ‘Judge Montagu's grandmother was Mrs Martha Ray, the opera singer, mistress of the Earl of Sandwich, by whom she had—illegitimately, of course—the Judge's father, Basil Montagu. Mrs Ray came out of the theatre one night after watching a comedy, and just as she reached her carriage a clergyman in love with her came up and shot her in the head with a pistol. He then tried to shoot himself, but missed. He was hanged afterwards in a celebrated case.

‘Then Algy Montagu's mother died when he was four, and his father, Basil, a friend of Wordsworth's, thought it better the child be brought up in the country with the poet and his sister rather than in the smoke of London, where Basil was in legal practice.'

‘The Judge is related to John Montagu, the Colonial Secretary, I suppose?'

‘You might suppose it,' said Mr Chesney, ‘but you would be wrong.'

‘Different families altogether,' supplied his wife, ‘and the Judge is not truly mad at all.'

He was only called so, she explained, on account of his bad temper in the court.

When he first came out to Van Diemen's Land eight or nine years ago, Mr Chesney interrupted, the Judge was only twenty-six, and had in his care a family friend, the wife of Mr Henry Savery, a gentleman convict in the colony, a writer and newspaperman transported for forgery. Savery's wife Eliza had started out from England earlier that year in the
Jessie Lawson
, but the ship was wrecked.

(‘Yes, it was, poor woman,' murmured Mrs Chesney.)

Mrs Savery and her son being rescued, Chesney went on, they transferred to the
Henry Wellesley
and continued their journey. And no doubt she was in need of comfort after the shipwreck—but Mr Algy Montagu comforted her somewhat
more
than required, apparently . . .

‘Whereupon, when they reached Hobarton and Henry Savery heard of it, what does he do but cut his own throat from ear to ear,' interjected Bess triumphantly. ‘He was only saved by Doctor Crowther, who sewed his head back on.'

‘And after all that, Savery's wife did not stop in Hobarton,' added Chesney. ‘Savery being soon arrested for debt, she took the next ship home. You wouldn't do that, Bess, if I was took for debt?'

‘Best not try me,' said his wife, pursing her lips at her knitting. ‘There's no knowing.'

‘At any rate,' said McLeod, ‘Savery recovered himself enough to write the colony's first novel,
Quintus Servinton
.'

‘Any good?' asked Seymour.

‘No,' said McLeod.

Three weeks later the weather began to cool again, and towards the end of February 1838 we resumed our winter clothes. Squalls appeared like bruises on the horizon, sped towards us, passed over the ship in rods of icy rain, and vanished into the distance. The ship heeled on at speed, floor and table at an incline. When it was necessary to move about, which we did less and less, we lurched and staggered.